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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Teaser Tuesday (18 January)

This is my 52nd Teaser Tuesday, which means I've been following the little game for a year now. That may be "just shy" of a year, since my first TT post was published on 19 January 2010. I enjoy this weekly diversion, though it and Top Ten Tuesdays keep me up entirely too late on Monday evenings. ;-)

Since this is an anniversary, let's make it a triple course!

"You wouldn't become an American for liberty, Sam, because you don't think we lack it. And you wouldn't become an American out of a republican conviction, because you can't even spell it -- but you'd become an American for Caroline. That's what love is, Sam."

Redcoat, Bernard Cornwell.

This is overly long but entirely too good to not share.

The NCF [No-Conscription Fellowship] scored another another rhetorical point when, in the course of one legal case, a lawyer on the government's side, Sir Archibald Bodkin (best known to history as the man who would later get James Joyce's novel Ulysses banned from publication is postwar England) declared that "war will become impossible if all men were to have the view that war is wrong." Delighted, the NCF proceeded to issue a poster with exactly those words on it, credited to Bodkin. The government then arrested an NCF member for putting up this subversive poster. In response, the NCF's lawyer demanded the arrest of Bodkin, as the author of the offending words. The organization's newspaper -- named, with deliberate irony, the Tribunal -- called for Bodkin to prosecute himself, and declared that the NCF would provide relief payments to his wife and children if he sent himself to jail.

To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild.

I was planning on posting a teaser from Sex on Six Legs, but do you really want to read the context of the phrase "pulsing inside with fly"?

...yes? Okay, then. It's your stomach.

Once a female fly locates a calling cricket, she deposits tiny larvae on him. A larva, usually one but sometimes two or even three, burrows inside the cricket's body and starts, every so slowly, to eat his flesh while he is still alive. First it feeds on his body fat, but eventually, as the fly maggot grows until it occupies the entire body, from head to abdomen, it consumes the male's other organs so he is is a shell that looks like cricket but is pulsing inside with fly.

p. 18, Sex on Six Legs: Lessons on Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World. Marlene Zuk.